We listed on the Google Apps marketplace 3 months back, and the response to GrexIt that we've seen from Google Apps users has been extremely encouraging. GrexIt's easy email sharing functionality is being used daily by hundreds of Google Apps users to add value to their project management, HR, sales, operations and support processes. We're constantly engaging closely with all companies using GrexIt to see what they find useful about GrexIt, and what they would like to improve and build in the next few months.

Atos, a giant tech firm with billions of dollars in revenues annually, recently announced that they plan to put in place a Zero Internal Email policy for all internal communication by 2014. This has grabbed a lot of attention, and has invited comments, both negative and positive. We thought it would make sense to try and understand what might be Atos's motiviation towards trying to do this, and whether moving to Zero internal email makes any sense at all.

The GrexIt Team is hosting lunch at Coffee N U on 12th Nov. after the Startup Saturday in Bangalore. We'd be talking to programmers about how we built GrexIt, scaling issues going forward, addressing customers' security/ privacy concerns against cloud apps, and myriad other geeky topics. 

We have ten invites to give away to programmers. Get hold of us (Nitesh and Niraj) in GrexIt T-Shirts during the event tomorrow for an invite. See you there!

Shared or Public Folders have been a hugely popular feature in MS Outlook and Exchnage, whereas they have always been absent from Google Apps email. Being able to share email conversations with your colleagues is of great value for most email users, and GrexIt brings this functionality into Google Apps. And its so much better than Shared email Folders as someone familiar with Outlook would know about.

You can view GrexIt as a public folder for your entire company, where you and your colleagues can easily submit conversations at a single click of a button on your email interface. On adding to GrexIt, the whole conversation, along with attachments are added to GrexIt. Not just that, after a conversation is added to GrexIt, GrexIt automatically keeps track of any further messages received on that conversation and pull them into the version of the conversation inside GrexIt.

Shared Labels in GrexIt make it very easy to organize the conversations, and specify Access Controls on them. For instance, you can easily define a label called "Finance" in GrexIt, and give access to that label only to the members of the Finance and Accounts team in your company. After that, as soon as the label "Finance" is applied to a conversation in GrexIt, the access to view that conversation becomes limited to the Finance and Accounts teams. Using Shared Labels, it is very easy to create sections inside GrexIt, accessible only to specific people inside your company.

GrexIt does not stop there, and gives you automation with a feature called Fetch Rules. Using Fetch Rules, you can instruct GrexIt to automatically pick up specific email conversations from the inboxes of people in your company. For example, when your Accounts person adds a label called "Invoice" on a conversation in his inbox, GrexIt can automatically pick it up from his inbox and share it with the Finance and Accounts teams. Future versions of Fetch Rules would support fetching on conversations based on keywords and recepients. Fetch Rules allow you to create a system to automatically pull in useful email conversations and share them with the right people in your company.

GrexIt is the easiest way for you and your team to share and archive useful email communication. Sign up now at http://grexit.com.

We just released GrexIt on the Google Apps marketplace. Now, if you are an admin of your Google Apps account, you can add GrexIt to your account by going here. Here's why you should do that:

Well, I know what I know, but does my company, as a company, know what it knows, and does it draw on this knowledge frequently?

There are two very important aspects of this problem, which we call the What and the How:

1. What: Exactly what is worth knowing, retaining, remembering, and drawing from. Its a hard problem, because these nuggets of knowledge are usually hidden beneath tons of communication and material which, although very important, has no enduring value. That useful email conversation with a client, or that important document can easily get lost between mounds of notes, emails and documents we generate as a company every week.
2. How: Once (1) is figured out, how easy is it to take these nuggets out of the tons of material that its hiding under, and put it into a place that allows everyone to access it when they need it. How easy is it to find the right stuff, and how to make it so easy to use that the right stuff just shows up by itself when its needed.

As a company, and as an individual, there is nothing worse than not drawing from what has been learnt in the past. For people, it can disastrous, and for companies more so. What does your company do to address the What and the How of this problem?

Being able to retain knowledge and draw on it makes good companies great. Knowledge not tapped into and lost translates into real, hard cash losses. Organizations around the world have realized this, and Knowledge retention and management are now well identified areas of research and activity.

For a Knowledge management strategy to succeed, it must tap into knowledge where its created, and in the process of its creation. That is what makes email extremely important for any Knowledge management plan. For a lot of us, our mail inboxes are the most important go-to source of information at work.

Email really goes way beyond being just a communication tool. With multi-GigaByte inboxes that we are used to now, our email inboxes are probably the richest sources of information and knowledge at our disposal, containing information that is inherently very contextual because it was sent to us by someone who thought it makes sense to us. If you are using an email service with very high quality search like Gmail, searching your inbox almost becomes second nature. Along with the power to organize your conversations offered by labels, your email inbox transforms itself into a potent tool that stores stuff that is of immense value to you, and also makes finding useful stuff very easy.

Now if we could go beyond being able to search just our own inboxes, and could obtain the right information from the inbox of any of our colleagues, that could turn out to be an extremely potent tool. I could instantly find:

• Answer to a question I have which was answered by someone in my company an year back
• A document I need from a colleague's inbox
• Know if someone else has handled a client query similar to what I have to answer now
• Quickly find who in my company interacted in the past with a client, a vendor or a service provider

The list can actually go on endlessly. The challenge here is to enable access to the 'right stuff' from people's inboxes,and to the 'right people'. Making email a part of the Knowledge Management strategy of a company can help its people achieve very high levels of productivity.

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This post draws heavily from our earlier post "The Power of the Collective Inbox". This post also outlines the core idea behind our product, GrexIt.

Thats right - we use GrexIt for managing Support for GrexIt users. This is how we do it:

- We get our Support requests on our individual email ids. We tried making sure everyone mails support@grexit.com for help. That broke often, because some users are now used to communicating with specific team members, and like mailing them directly if they need help or face an issue.

- Our support@grexit.com email id auto-forwards to the whole team. Anyone from the team who decides to work on the issue tells everyone by email that he has taken up the item. If the request came individually to a team member, he usually starts working on the issue without bringing other team members into the loop if they are not needed.

- The person who starts working on the issue adds it to GrexIt with the label "GrexIt Support", and another label that shows who is working on this item. We just use a label with the person's name. So if I am working on an item, I'll just add another GrexIt label to it called "Niraj".

- After that we just continue the conversation with the person who wrote in to us over email, without keeping other team members in CC if not needed. GrexIt keeps track of the conversation and keeps a completely updated version of the conversation for access by all our team members.

- Once a support item is closed, the person working on the item goes into GrexIt and marks a label on it called "Closed".

- Any team member can go into GrexIt and view all the support items by looking at the label "GrexIt Support".

- They can also easily see which are the support items which are open, and who is working on them using our label filtered search feature.

Its really quick and effective for our small team. We can stay inside our email inboxes most of the time while getting the job done, and hey, isn't that Nirvana!

If you've used Basecamp, chances are pretty high that you love it. We do. I have, in the past, used Basecamp to manage a bunch of consulting assignments, and Basecamp really made our life easy. We have worked with many task management and collaboration tools, and I must say Basecamp takes the cake when it comes to being simply, purely functional. For projects that are not very long drawn and not very complex, Basecamp offers just the right set of tools to get the work done smoothly.

But having used Basecamp to manage and collaborate on some fairly large projects that ran for more than 2 years and involved around 15 people, we have come to believe that Basecamp needs to play much better with email than it currently does. The following are some of the scenarios that came up while managing some really large projects which made us think so:

• Email conversations on a project happen even before the project "starts": Before a large project starts, and is even finalized, there are loads of communication about the project regarding architecture, design, technology and planning. In a consulting set-up, a lot of this happens before the project is awarded to the contractor / consultant / freelancer. Now once the project starts, communication can almost completely shift to Basecamp, but all these email conversations with useful information stay inside email inboxes, completely detached from where all the action is happening. 

• While Basecamp gives a place for all team members on a project to interact on, there is a lot of communication which might need to involve people who are not team members on the project. Example: while working on a specific problem on a project, you might need to talk to experts who might not be a part of the team working on the project. Some of them might not even be a part of your company. In scenarios like this, the communication mostly happens over email, and again, does not show up inside Basecamp.

• Feedback, issues and bugs reported by users, customers, testers and friends end up becoming tasks in Basecamp a lot of times. Now since a lot of these issues reported are over email, Basecamp seriously lacks ways to convert such emails into tasks, and then also continue the conversation with the person who reported the issue from inside Basecamp. 

There are other scenarios too, but these are the most important ones. In general, we strongly feel all collaboration tools must play very well with email in order to be completely effective.